[lit-ideas] Seduction, Not Force, That's Where It's At

  • From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 23:13:47 +0900

Was replying to some comments on bestoftheblogs, and this popped out
of my fingers. Thought some here might be amused.

*****************


Not force, seduction, leading to addiction

Sandy, commenting on Mikey's remark, challenges the description of
what the modern corporate economy does as

"forcing consumers to fund their purchases with a massive increase in
debt acquisition."

Allow me to wax a trifle academic here and ride one of my hobbyhorses.
In my view, "force" and "power" are terms now so cliched that they
obscure rather enlighten political discussion. They belong, as many
commentators have noted, to a world conceived in terms of mechanical
systems, where the application of force with sufficient power
automatically produces a certain result. The result of that is the
kind of thinking that suggested to Robert McNamara and his whiz kids
that a properly calibrated application of force (measured in tonnage
of bombs) would bring the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to their
knees, or more recently that, since the US has the most powerful
military in the world, everyone else will automatically bend to our
will.

We now live (we always did) in a world of soft as well as hard power,
where soft power is what we used to call influence, the influence we
had when people accepted what we said because they had good reasons to
believe that we were, if not on the side of the angels, at least being
reasonable in the offers and demands we made. Now the relevant
metaphors are cybernetic--not mechanical--systems. Influence works
like a virus or worm or the DNA in our cells, transmitting messages
that may or may not fit the receptors at which they're directed.

Marketing has gone the same way. There are so many goods and so much
information pouring through the marketplace that the idea that anyone
could be forced to choose has become ridiculous. Now, for example,
someone in search of a car doesn't face the stark choice that Henry
Ford offered, a model T so long as it's black. Toyota gives you so
many choices when you buy an entry level Corolla that a single brand
is, in effect, 30,000 different models.

Thus it is that sociologists have been talking for years about
societies in which the primary source of power is no longer force but
seduction. The marketer/politicians' wet dream isn't people who have
to be coerced to buy the product and do what they are told. It is,
instead, people so seduced by the messages they offer that they are,
in effect, addicted—they themselves feel that they can't live without
it.

Sure, people addicted to consumerism still like to talk about being
forced to have the next new thing. But by using the language of force
they not only shift responsibility elsewhere (the old blame game),
they make it impossible to develop a critical awareness of how
seduction works and their own roles in the system. They never learn
the systemic thinking that would help them avoid the traps observed by
management consultants like Peter Senghe: reacting to events, blaming
the other, not noticing what's happening until a problem becomes
overwhelming.

Sure they feel trapped. But seeing the trap as a force instead of a
puzzle. That's what has us screwed.

--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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